Lesson 8: Palmiers and Puff Pastry Sandwich with Raspberry

For today, we used the puff pastry that we have prepared the day before to do the palters and puff pastry with raspberry (I forgot the french name for this). It was another tiring lesson as we had so many things to do! And this is the first lesson that we had to alter our practical workflow according to how our pastries are. Each pastry needs about 5 turns so if you have not done up to the third turn on this lesson, you will have to do more turns! So it was quite a frantic rush I would say, working non-stop for the whole three hours of practical class. We had Chef Geraldine today, which was very very good as I really learnt a lot from her. Remember I mentioned that my pastries were a bit non-rectangular? She taught us ways to 'fix' this and i think it looks so much better now! Although I still have to improve on the ways to incorporate the butter but i think it is getting better.

We also had to start a new puff pastry today, and using the 'french' method instead of the normal method to incorporate the butter. I was very very careful as I really want to make a nice pastry this time. And it is definitely a great improvement from the previous pastry.

For the pastry dough that we made in the previous lesson, we used it to do palters, or they call it butterflies. Those you can normally buy it in stores. Didn't know it is so hard to make! (If you start from making the dough). And because for palmiers and the puff pastry with raspberry jam, we need to trim off some parts of the pastry, I managed to trim off quite a bit of the bad parts of my pastry, and I would say, the pastry turned out quite well and even! So am quite happy with this lesson!

So after the lesson today, me and Aileen decided to talk to the student services about the number of people in the class, as we are feeling quite squeezy. Also, we heard that there were only 8 people in another Basic Pastry Group and less than 12 in other groups. Just wanted to raise our concern since this will be for the rest of the semester. The office's reply was that for the 8 people class, the class was small, and maximum that it can fit is 7 people but they squeezed in 8. For the rest, she said that the class size has been fixed as they need to order ingredients for different classes so they can't change us now. She also mentioned that the maximum the class can fit is 14, and we only have 13. Well, I guess if we wanted to keep talking we could raise concerns about how come they didn't put some people in classes with lesser people, but I personally thought it was quite pointless. So we just have to make do then and probably redistribute the position in the class a bit. But one thing I found out was that there are different standards, as in some people get to choose their classes and some didn't. Whoever paid in advance, they got to choose the class. And those that didn't pay before the dateline didn't get to choose. Something that I find can be improved as it has inconvenienced quite a lot of people. I was lucky to get to choose though. And it does look like the school is taking in a lot of students, probably up to the brim already. Well, I do hope that they will improve on this as they are raising the fees again and if students do not feel comfortable in the class the 'standard' of the school might drop.

For the butterflies, panya gave me a very high rating of 8.0! and 8.5 for the one with raspberry! I personally like this very much too!

Palmiers by Chef Geraldine

Palmiers by Li Lian

Puff with Raspberry by Chef Geraldine

Puff with Raspberry By Li Lian